Announcement! vSAN Deep Dive book updated for 7.0 U3

I am delighted to announce an updated version of the vSAN Deep Dive book. It’s been a while since we did an update to this book. The most recent version was for vSAN 6.7 U1. A lot has changed since then. We’ve seen the arrival of some significant features such as vSAN File Service and HCI-Mesh.  We have also seen vSAN positioned as a platform for Cloud Native Applications through integration with the vSphere CSI driver and Kubernetes. There have been plenty of other enhancements such as Compression Only support, Durability Components and changes around Capacity Management and reservations. In…

Kubernetes, vSAN Stretched Cluster with CSI driver v2.5.1

In this post, we will look at a relatively new announcement around support for vanilla or upstream Kubernetes clusters, vSAN stretched cluster and the vSphere CSI driver. There are a number of updates around this recently, so I want to highlight a few observations before we get into the deployment. First of all, it is important to highlight that a vSAN Stretched Cluster can have at most 2 fault domains. These are the data sites. While there is a requirement for a third site for the witness, the witness site does not store any application data. Thus all of the…

CSI Snapshots in action (vSphere CSI 2.5) [Video]

I have created a short video to demonstrate the new CSI snapshots feature in vSphere CSI driver version 2.5. This demo begins with an existing Pod + PVC/PV volume on vSphere storage, take a snapshot of the volume, then restore it to a new PVC. This new volume will then be mounted by a new Pod, and we will examine it to see if the data was successfully captured and restored. The manifests demonstrated in this video are available for download on this GitHub repository. Hope you find it useful.

Announcing vSphere CSI driver v2.5 support for CSI snapshots

I’m delighted to announce that VMware has just released a new version of the vSphere CSI driver for Kubernetes. The full release notes are available here. This 2.5 version now has support for CSI snapshots, a feature that many customers and partners have been waiting for. This features enables snapshots to be taken of block-based persistent volumes, as well as the ability to restore snapshots to persistent volumes. Those of you familiar with the CSI driver will notice two additional Kubernetes components to enable snapshot support. The first is a new snapshot controller. When a snapshot is created, two new…

VMworld 2021 – My Top 10 Picks around Storage

Following on from last week’s post, VMworld 2021 – My Top 10 Picks around Kubernetes, I decided to do another post on my other favorite topic – storage. As per other years, storage continues to evolve, both for traditional workloads and new modern application/container workloads. And as you might expect, there are lots of good sessions at this years VMworld 2021 event that highlights these new and upcoming storage innovations. Without further ado, here are my top 10 storage picks: Storage Vision and Strategy There are two storage sessions related to storage vision and strategy that I picked out. The…

VMworld 2021 – My Top 10 Picks around Kubernetes

Well here we are again – another VMworld has come around. As most of you will know, VMworld 2021 is going to be another “fully virtual” event (no pun intended), the same as it was for VMworld 2020. Hard to imagine that it is 3 years since I presented at VMworld 2018 in Las Vegas, and 2 years since I presented at VMworld EMEA 2019 in Barcelona. Strange days indeed. Let’s hope we can all get together at VMworld 2022 and have a blast. Like previous years, I have picked out a few presentations that I plan on attending at…

vSAN File Service backed Persistent Volumes Network Access Controls [Video]

A short video to demonstrate how network access to Kubernetes Persistent Volumes, that are backed by vSAN File Service file shares, can be controlled. This allows an administrator to determine who has read-write access and who has read-only access to a volume, based on the network from which they are accessing the volume. This involves modifying the configuration file of the vSphere CSI driver, as shown in the following demonstration. The root squash parameter can also be controlled using this method. This links to a more detailed step-by-step write-up on how to configure the CSI driver configuration file and control…